by Gwynne Dyer
Major W.G. Barker, DSO, MC, and the officers under his command, present their compliments to Captains Brumowski, Ritter von Fiala, Havratil and the pilots under their command, and request the pleasure of a meeting in the air. In order to save Captains Brumowski, Ritter von Fiala and Havratil and the gentlemen of their party the inconvenience of searching for them, Major Barker and his officers will bomb Godega Aerodrome at 10 a.m. daily, weather permitting, for the next fortnight.
Leaflets dropped over the Austrian lines in Italy by No. 139 Squadron (Major Barker commanding) in mid-1918
In late 1918 Major William Barker of Dauphin, Manitoba, was already one of the leading aces of the war, with forty-six confirmed victories accumulated in two and a half years of fighting over the Western Front and in Italy. (The Austrian Air Force sensibly kept its leading aces on the ground during the daily bombing of Godega airfield despite Barker’s generous invitation.) But Barker was also, at the age of twenty-three, a man living on borrowed time, for even very good pilots rarely survived as long as he had in combat.
By late 1918 the Allied authorities well understood the propaganda value of live aces in boosting their populations’ flagging morale, so Barker was eventually posted to command an air-fighting school in England in order to keep him alive. His protests were unsuccessful, but he did manage to get himself appointed to a squadron in France for ten days on the way home, on the grounds that German aerial tactics over the Western Front were now different from those he had become familiar with in his more recent experience against the Austrian Air Force over Italy. He had still seen no enemy aircraft when he took off alone for England on October 27 at the end of his ten days’ stay in France, however, so he decided to take one last peek over the front.
He was in luck, sort of. As his Snipe fighter climbed to 21,000 feet over the Forêt de Mormal he spotted a Rumpler two-seat observation aircraft on a reconnaissance flight high above the British lines. But as he concentrated on the Rumpler he failed to notice the entire “flying circus” of sixty Fokker D-VIIs, the latest and fastest type of German fighter, that was flying beneath him stacked up in three or four echelons. As the Rumpler broke up before Barker’s guns, one of the German fighters, climbing in a near stall, raked his plane from below with machine-gun fire and shattered his right thigh with an explosive bullet. Barker threw the Snipe into a spin and levelled out several thousand feet below, only to find himself in the midst of fifteen more Fokker D-VIIs. He got in quick bursts at three of them, setting one on fire at ten yards’ range, but then he was wounded in the other thigh and fainted.
Barker spun down to fifteen thousand feet before he recovered consciousness and pulled his fighter out of its dive once more—only to find himself in the middle of a lower echelon of the same German formation. By sheer instinct he got on the tail of one of them, but by the time it burst into flames his own aircraft was being riddled with bullets from behind; one bullet shattered his left elbow and he passed out again, dropping to twelve thousand feet before he came to amidst the lower echelon of the flying circus. As the German fighters milled around his smoking machine, taking turns to attack from every point of the compass, it was clear to the thousands of British and Canadian troops watching from the trenches below that Barker was finished.
He must have thought so too, because he aimed his tattered Snipe at one of the D-VIIs and flew straight toward it as if to ram, firing as he went. But at the last instant it disintegrated and Barker hurtled through the wreckage; in the clear for a moment, he dove for the British trenches and crossed them at treetop height, finally crashing into the barbed-wire entanglements around a British balloon site just behind the lines.
“The hoarse shout, or rather the prolonged roar, which greeted the triumph of the British fighter, and which echoed across the battle front, was never matched … on any other occasion,” recalled Colonel Andy McNaughton, a militia officer who had risen to command the Canadian Corps Heavy Artillery and watched the fight from his advanced headquarters near Valenciennes. (McNaughton became commander of the entire Canadian army in the next war.)
Billy Barker’s lonely last fight, in which he added four more aircraft to his score, won him the Victoria Cross and failed to dampen his ebullience even slightly. “By Jove, I was a foolish boy, but anyhow I taught them a lesson,” he told the newspapers from his hospital bed near Rouen ten days later. Although his leg wounds never properly healed and he had to walk with canes for the rest of his life, Barker stayed in aviation after the war, founding Canada’s first (spectacularly unsuccessful) commercial airline in collaboration with another Canadian ace and Victoria Cross winner, Billy Bishop, briefly becoming director of the new Royal Canadian Air Force, and continuing to fly personally until he was killed in a crash at Ottawa’s Uplands Airport in 1930.
The exploits of Barker and men like him, in a kind of combat that seemed to retain some of the honour and glory that had traditionally been associated with warfare, provided Canadians with virtually the only relief from the bitter news arriving daily from the trenches. But it was on the ground that the war would ultimately be won or lost, and by late 1917 the demand for fresh cannon fodder had become so great that the government was knocking on the door of every family in Canada.
Prime Minister Borden’s decision in May 1917 to bring in conscription was greeted with grim satisfaction in much of English Canada. The enthusiasm of the early days was long gone—too many families had already lost a son or a husband—but in its place, especially in the homes of the bereaved, was an inflexible determination to win the war and to make sure that the suffering was shared by all.
The casualty lists were never printed until during the next week, and I can remember the appalling lines down the paper. And you’d look at it, you know, watching for the names that you knew.
Q. How did people in the West feel about conscription?
Well, I think they were all for it. Because after all, the flower of the flock had already been taken.
Naomi Radford, Edmonton
Borden could in all honesty argue that the voluntary system was no longer working. In the fighting of April and May 1917 the Canadian Corps in France suffered 24,000 casualties, and recruitment at home was only 11,000. At that rate the army would run out of men fairly soon, so compulsion seemed to him the only solution. But Borden’s problems were greatly eased by the serious split over conscription that now began to tear the Liberal opposition apart.
French-speaking Liberals unanimously opposed conscription, but most of the prominent English-speaking Liberals were conscriptionists by conviction, and the rest were hedging out of political necessity. Even William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier’s protégé and likely successor, who had opposed conscription all along precisely because it would split both the Liberal party and the country, was starting to waver, fearing that there might be no future for an English-speaking politician who didn’t line up with the English-speaking majority on this issue. “I have changed my views on conscription as the war has progressed and I have seen freedom threatened,” he announced.
Borden’s Conservatives split on English-French lines over conscription, too: the few remaining prominent French Canadian Conservatives in his cabinet warned him that if the Conservative Party brought in conscription, it would be destroyed in Quebec for twenty-five years. But the Conservatives depended much less heavily than Laurier’s Liberals on French Canadian votes, and Borden was under too much pressure from conscriptionists in the rest of the country—and from the war itself—to back down. Moreover, he was convinced that conscription was what the men at the front wanted. Indeed, that may have been his most powerful motive:
If we do not pass this measure, if we do not provide reinforcements, with what countenance shall we meet them on their return? … If what are left of 400,000 such men come back to Canada with fierce resentment and even rage in their hearts, conscious that they have been deserted or betrayed, how shall we meet them when they ask the reason? I am not so much concerned for the day when
this Bill becomes law, as for the day these men return if it is rejected.
Both Borden and Laurier realized that the country was heading into a crisis, and Borden hoped to weather it by forming a coalition government. However, Laurier’s unwavering opposition to conscription made that impossible, and he demanded a referendum on the issue (like the one that had recently rejected conscription in Australia).
The law of the land, which antedates Confederation by many generations, and which was reintroduced at the time of Confederation, emphatically declared that no man in Canada shall be subjected to compulsory military service except to repel invasion for the defence of Canada. My honourable friend says the first line of defence for Canada is in France and Flanders. I claim there never was any danger of invasion on the part of Germany. Nobody can say that Canada, for one instant during the last three years, was in danger of invasion.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier
In English Canada, there was an impression that if the French Canadians would only stop listening to Bourassa—if only Laurier would give them a lead—then they would see the error of their ways and start joining the army in large numbers. But that was nonsense: Laurier was compelled to oppose conscription both by his own long-held political principles and by the urgent need to provide some legitimate political voice for the very large number of Canadians (not all of them French Canadians, by any means) who vehemently disapproved of conscription. It was a bitter end to Laurier’s lifelong role as a bridge between English and French Canada, but it was perhaps the greatest service he ever did for the country.
Now if I were to waver, to hesitate or to flinch, I would simply hand over the Province of Quebec to the extremists. I would lose the respect of the people whom I thus addressed, and would deserve it. I would not only lose their respect, but my own self respect also.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, letter to Newton Rowell, June 8, 1917
Even with Laurier’s Liberals providing a legitimate political vehicle for opposing conscription, the customary Quebec phenomenon whereby political moderates are outflanked in public by Nationalist extremists soon made itself felt with a vengeance at the anti-conscription political meetings and demonstrations that proliferated in Quebec’s cities. From the start these were marked by blood-curdling threats and occasional street violence. On May 25 Colonel Armand Lavergne, a former commander of the militia regiment at Montmagny and a well-known Nationalist, told a great throng in Quebec City: “I will go to jail or be hanged or shot before I will accept [conscription]. The Conscription of 1917 had its origin in 1899, when Canada sent men to assist in crushing a small nation in the Transvaal.… It is not for Canada to defend England, but for England to defend Canada.” The crowd cheered lustily, and then went and smashed the windows of the Quebec Chronicle and L’Événement, the two pro-government papers in the city.
Throughout the long summer of 1917, as the Military Service Bill dragged its slow way through Parliament, the political atmosphere in Quebec grew steadily more poisonous. Almost every warm evening during June and July, crowds of young men surged through the streets in the French-speaking quarters of Montreal breaking windows, firing off blank rounds and shouting “À bas Borden” and “Vive la Révolution.”
Tancrède Marsil, whose antiwar newspaper Le Réveil had closed down in March 1917 after a warning from Ottawa, got his second wind from the government’s decision to bring in conscription, and soon exercised a powerful influence through his new paper La Liberté and his impassioned speeches. In late June in Waterloo, in the Eastern Townships, he told the crowd: “before we have conscription, we will have revolution,” and added that the people of Quebec would prefer to see “two or three thousand men killed in the streets rather than send three hundred thousand men to Europe.” His angry audience responded by breaking nearby windows and cursing the Quebec Conservatives.
Talk like that made people very nervous in 1917, when real revolutions were breaking out in some other parts of the world: it was scarcely a year since the Easter Rising in Dublin, and only a couple of months since the Russian Revolution in Petrograd in February. And the pressure in Quebec just went on building: on July 15 Colonel Lavergne declared before fifteen thousand people at Quebec City:
If the Conscription law is enforced (French) Canadians have only one choice—to die in Europe or to die in Canada. As far as I am concerned, if my body is to fall in any land, I want it to be on Canadian soil.
On July 24 Ottawa moved to close down Marsil’s newspaper La Liberté after it had called for a general strike, a run on the banks and, if necessary, a revolution—but by that time a certain Élie Lalumière, a dealer in electrical fixtures and one of Marsil’s many rivals in street rhetoric, was claiming to have five hundred men under training in Montreal to resist conscription by force of arms.
The first phase of the crisis peaked in August, as Borden’s Military Service Bill finally passed into law with the support of more than twenty English-speaking Liberals who had deserted Laurier to vote for it. Lord Atholstan, the publisher of the Montreal Star and a vocal supporter of conscription, had received numerous threats, and at four o’clock on the morning of August 9 his house at Cartierville, a rural part of Montreal Island, was dynamited. It was a large stone house and none of the family or servants was hurt, but the explosives were found to be from a load of 350 pounds of dynamite that had been stolen from a quarry by a gang of masked men at the beginning of the month. A terrorist campaign was feared, and so the Dominion Police* were brought in. They offered a large reward for the culprits, twelve men were arrested—and one of them turned out to be the regular anti-conscription speaker, Élie Lalumière.
Lalumière detailed plots to blow up the Star offices, the Gazette and the Mount Royal Club, and to assassinate Sir Robert Borden and other well-known political figures. The English-language press described his associates as “desperadoes, cocaine fiends, wanted for several murders and crimes.” By the end of the summer of 1917 many members of the public in Montreal were signing an anti-conscription “Declaration” which warned that “if the Bill is enforced Borden and his men will have to suffer the penalty of death,” and on August 30 the city was swept by demonstrations, marches, outbreaks of looting and clashes with the police during which revolvers were freely used and at least seven men were wounded.
But the proto-insurrectionary character of the street violence and the growing number of attacks on property in the anti-conscription protests began to worry the French Canadian establishment. The higher clergy of the Catholic church in Quebec, in accord with tradition, had supported the British from the start and now reluctantly backed conscription too, but hitherto the French Canadian political and cultural elites (and the business elite, such as it was) had mostly turned a blind eye to what was happening in the streets because of their sympathy for the anti-conscriptionist cause. Matters were now clearly getting out of hand, however—and at the same time they were offered a safer and more moderate way of opposing conscription, in the form of an imminent federal election. For there did, after all, seem to be a chance of defeating conscription through the ballot box.
By October 1917 Prime Minister Borden had succeeded in forming a “Union” government, which incorporated most of the English-speaking Liberals, especially from Ontario and the West, as well as his own Conservatives. However, he had failed to win bipartisan support for an extension of Parliament past its normal term. That meant he had to call an election before the end of 1917, and he was by no means certain of winning that election. Even in English Canada, organized labour and farmers were dead against conscription, and the popular magazine Everywoman’s World found that a six-to-one majority among its readers opposed it (although that mattered less, since women didn’t have the vote). What worried Borden’s government most, however, was “French, foreigners, slackers.”
Quebec was a lost cause for the Conservatives: the entire Nationalist movement, with Henri Bourassa in the lead, placed itself at the service of the Liberal opposition. “We ask nothing
better than to assist Laurier to throw out of power the Government which has proved itself a traitor to the Nation,” Bourassa wrote in Le Devoir—and the Nationalists ran practically no candidates of their own in Quebec in order not to split the anti-conscription vote.
The Conservatives had good reason to worry about the Prairie provinces, too. They could more or less count on the “British” element of the Western population, but the great surge of immigration that had rapidly populated the Prairies in the two decades before the war had also included a high proportion of “foreigners”—particularly Ukrainians—who felt even less enthusiasm than French Canadians for sending their sons to die for Britain: all three Prairie provinces had voted Liberal in the most recent provincial elections.
But in the West (unlike Quebec), the Union government had an opportunity to shift the voting balance radically by disenfranchizing the Ukrainians, most of whom came from Austrian-controlled Galicia and therefore technically counted as enemy aliens. Nor would such a flagrant act of electoral manipulation alienate those Prairie voters, mostly “British,” who were potential Conservative supporters. The Ukrainians were not actually sympathetic to their former Austrian imperial masters, of course, but Anglo-Saxon jealousy at the growing prosperity of Ukrainian homesteaders, and fury at the refusal of Ukrainian farm labourers to accept the low pre-war wages at a time of booming grain prices, easily translated into racism.
One Alberta MLA told the Toronto Telegram how sad it made him to see the country “being cleared of our fine Anglo-Saxon stock and the alien left to fatten on war prosperity.” The Wartime Elections Act of 1917 adroitly exploited this prejudice—and destroyed the mainstay of Liberal anti-conscriptionist sentiment in the West—by taking the vote away from all naturalized Canadians born in enemy countries who had arrived in Canada after 1902. It was election-rigging on a breathtaking scale. Borden’s government also generously gave women the vote—but only to women who might be expected to support conscription: those serving as nurses with the Canadian forces, and the far larger number of female relatives of serving soldiers. (One angry suffragette leader wrote to Borden suggesting that it would have been simpler if he just disqualified everyone who didn’t promise to vote Conservative.)